Do we really have to take military action to Syria?

But what is the system? The vote coming up on Syria represents two systems. The voice of the people and the voice of central government. Some people might vote for a strike on Syria for no other reason than that they support central government right or wrong.

The Constitution, it seems to me, is [was] always on the side of the voice of the people. Which is a thorny issue when MONEY force is applied to engineering that voice.

There is no solution beyond a fist banged on the desk.

A brief guide of all the relevant information is useful. So here are the things we know -- or think we know -- about the Syrian rebels.

The majority of Syria's rebels are under the nominal control of the Supreme Military Council (SMC), which was established in December 2012 and was an outgrowth of a regional military council formed in the country a year before. The SMC is led by Gen. Salim Idriss and is the primary intermediary between the rebellion's on-the-ground leadership and its exiled government-in-waiting, the Syrian National Council (SNC). David Ignatius reported on Tuesday that the commander of the SMC's southern division, Gen. Ziad Fahd, had told him he had 30,000 Free Syrian Army troops ready to march to Damascus in the event of U.S. missile strikes.

"That's probably a slight exaggeration," Elizabeth O'Bagy, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War and political director at the Syrian Emergency Task Force, told Foreign Policy by phone. "There are a lot of fighters there, but it's not clear that they're coordinated enough to conduct an operation like that."

That's partially because of the multitude of smaller rebel groups, both within and outside the SMC's authority. The largest organization under the SMC banner is the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front (SILF). "The [SILF] is the much more moderate alliance in Syria,"O'Bagy explains. "They have had to sign a code of conduct" and answer to the SMC's leadership.

Or at least they do most of the time. On Aug. 22, four of the five commanders of the SMC's regional commands threatened to resign if they did not receive additional weapons and were not given greater license to work with more radical Islamist groups outside the SMC umbrella, something that has been practiced informally already.

Some of those groups comprise the Syrian Islamist Front. (That's the SIF, not to be confused with the SILF; you can see why the satirists at the Pan-Arabia Enquirer were reminded of the People's Front of Judea from Life of Brian.) The SIF is a more radical coalition that "has not formally joined the SMC," O'Bagy told FP. But, she noted, "there are a few battalions that associate with both. They'll say their part of both the SMC and the SIF."

Then there are the al Qaeda-affiliated groups Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS, formerly al-Qaeda in Iraq). They have sparred at the leadership level but tactically have what Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, characterizes as a "friendly rivalry." These groups don't answer to the SMC, the SILF, or the SIF; they have alternately fought alongside other rebel forces -- Kirk Sowell, principal of Uticensis Risk Services, noted in his recent piece for FP that, when delivering remarks after storming Menagh airbase a month ago, the SMC commander spoke briefly before passing the microphone to a local ISIS commander -- and against them, as in the city of Raqqa.

The number of Syrian rebels is contested, but many experts agree their strength is their numbers. Or as Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, wrote last month, "One way to understand the military dynamics of the Syrian civil war is to think of Jim Morrison and The Doors: 'They got the guns, but we got the numbers.'" O'Bagy says that, although the "identities [of rebel groups] are very fluid," she estimates there are approximately 80,000 to 100,000 rebels participating in offensive operations and protecting neighborhoods and towns, and that "the majority of those forces align with the SMC directly."

Approximately 10,000 to 15,000 rebels place themselves in the SIF camp. Estimates of the size of the al Qaeda-affiliated groups are also vague: Aaron Zelin, Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, estimates that 5,000 to 10,000 foreign jihadists have arrived in Syria, not to mention domestic recruits, while O'Bagy estimates that Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS supporters probably number in the 5,000 to 7,000 range.

Two weeks ago, on Aug. 25, Reuters reported a plan by the SNC to create a "national army" with more centralized control than the coalitions of convenience and momentary shared interests that have typified the rebellion. Saudi Arabia pledged $100 million to support a vanguard force of 6,000 to 10,000 troops in the new organization. The plan was rejected immediately by Islamist militias who saw it as a way to push them to the sidelines of the rebellion, and has been sharply criticized by commanders within the SMC. It does not appear to be moving forward, O'Bagy told FP, largely because the rebels don't feel they can risk alienating one another. As Zelin explained to Syria Deeply, "It's one of the biggest ironies: even though the opposition has been so fractured, they're interconnected on the battlefield because there's not one faction that's strong enough to strong-arm another faction. They need each other."

An error in a front page article published by The New York Times has elicited strong condemnation from supporters of the Syrian opposition on Friday for what they see as a misrepresentation of moderate rebels in the Syrian conflict.

On Thursday, the Times piece "Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West" went viral with the help of a gruesome execution video showing Syrian rebels reciting a macabre poem before executing seven unarmed regime soldiers. The video dominated cable news broadcasts and proliferated on social media websites and the Drudge Report. It also elicited a response from the State Department and Secretary of State John Kerry.

It was a newsworthy in part because it appeared to chip away at claims by the Obama administration that the Syrian opposition is largely made up of moderate forces. As The Times reported, the rebel commander who oversaw the executions in the video, Abdul Samad Issa, received weapons from the Western-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC), according to its source.

But the Syrian Support Group, a Washington-based advocate for more aggressive U.S. intervention in Syria, said Issa and his group, Jund al-Sham, has no connection to the Supreme Military Council and never did, in a statement to The Cable:

The article claims that the group has received supplies from the SMC command under General Idris, and that its relationship with national or international extremist groups is unknown. SSG has spoken to several of General Idris's deputy commanders, including Ltc. Musa'ab Saad Eldeen, as well as information-gathering contacts in Aleppo and Idlib for more information on the group.

According to all sources, the SMC has no previous or current relationship with Jund al-Sham and, contrary to the New York Times article, the group is not shown within the SMC's or SSG's delivery records as having received supplies from the SMC command. Jund al-Sham is independent of the SMC and of extremist groups, operates primarily in rural Idlib, and has relied heavily on fuel smuggling to Turkey for its funds.

Sometime after the SSG issued this statement to The Cable, the Times posted a correction to its article noting that the execution video was not from this year. In fact, it was "made in the spring of 2012," according to a correction at the bottom of the article. In a statement to The Cable, the SSG's media director Dan Layman said the correction further vindicated the group's point. "The Times just corrected their article to show the time stamp on the video was the spring of 2012. Before the SMC even existed," said Layman.

Although it's true that the SMC wasn't founded until December 2012, the latest version of the Times story says the rebel group received arms from the SMC sometime this year, which the Times notes does not contradict its story.

"The date of the video has been corrected. The other facts in the article and video are not in dispute," Danielle Rhoades Ha, director of communication at The Times, told The Cable.

In any event, Layman and other members of the opposition lobby say presenting the year-old video in the middle of the Congressoinal debate over authorizing war was tendentious. "It really suggests how they're willing to sacrifice truth for their own anti-war sentiments," he said, referring to the newspaper.

But regardless of when the execution video was made, it still happened, and offers a window into how some rebel groups operate or at least operated at one point in time. It's also just one of many gruesome web videos with unconfirmed origins that have been used by both sides of the war for propaganda purposes. You can bet it won't be the last.

Controversy over the video follows another meta-media story surrounding Elizabeth O'Bagy, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War cited this week by both Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain during congressional hearings. In particular, O'Bagy has been cited for her Aug. 30 Wall Street Journal column arguing that "moderate opposition groups make up the majority of actual fighting forces" of the opposition -- a contentious assertion in the debate over whether the U.S. should intervene in Syria. What U.S. officials and the the Journal failed to mention is that O'Bagy is paid by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a group that lobbies for greater U.S. intervention in Syria on behalf of the rebels.

from the link wrote:

What U.S. officials and the the Journal failed to mention is that O'Bagy is paid by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a group that lobbies for greater U.S. intervention in Syria on behalf of the rebels.

Surely with all technologies we have, it can be put to use to avoid taking innocent life.

Russia has asked Syria to put its chemical weapons stockpile under "international control" in a bid to avoid US military strikes, and then have them destroyed.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the offer was made during talks with his Syrian counterpart, and he hoped for a quick response from Damascus.
BBC

Russia has asked Syria to put its chemical weapons stockpile under "international control" in a bid to avoid US military strikes, and then have them destroyed.

The US secretary of state has said that President Bashar al-Assad has one week to hand over his entire stock of chemical weapons to avoid a military attack. But John Kerry added that he had no expectation that the Syrian leader would comply.

Kerry also said he had no doubt that Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in east Damascus on 21 August, saying that only three people are responsible for the chemical weapons inside Syria – Assad, one of his brothers and a senior general. He said the entire US intelligence community was united in believing Assad was responsible.

Kerry was speaking on Monday alongside the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, who was forced to deny that he had been pushed to the sidelines by the House of Commons decision 10 days ago to reject the use of UK force in Syria.

The US Senate is due to vote this week on whether to approve an attack and Kerry was ambivalent over whether Barack Obama would use his powers to ignore the legislative chamber, if it were to reject an attack.

The US state department stressed that Kerry was making a rhetorical argument about the one-week deadline and unlikelihood of Assad turning over Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. In a statement, the department added: "His point was that this brutal dictator with a history of playing fast and loose with the facts cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons, otherwise he would have done so long ago. That's why the world faces this moment."

This quote, "of playing fast and loose with the facts", isn't in JPB's post, Hawk. It only appears in your post.